Steve Jobs: Turn It Off

Michael Fassbender as Steve Jobs in Steve Jobs.

In Steve Jobs: The Man in the Machine, released a couple of months ago, you can feel the documentarian Alex Gibney struggling to find a shape for the story of this icon – a way of bridging the gap between his narcissism and callousness and the heroic status he occupies in the minds of millions of people. And the impossibility of building that bridge becomes the focus; the tone of the doc is as quizzical as it is critical and astonished. I found the movie’s ambling approach a little frustrating, but mostly I admired its refusal to pretend to have worked out a finished portrait of Jobs, and the material Gibney comes up with is fascinating. By contrast, the dramatic feature Steve Jobs, written by Aaron Sorkin (based on Walter Isaacson’s biography) and directed by Danny Boyle, exudes an air of gleaming confidence and it has a carefully groomed look – I’d say vellum-bound. (The production design is by Guy Hendrix Dyas and the cinematography is by Alwin Küchler; Elliot Graham edited it.) But these two A-list filmmakers and their A-list star, Michael Fassbender, don’t even get close to creating a convincing portrait of Jobs or of the empire he created, was exiled from, and eventually returned to as its reigning monarch.

Broken Sidewalk: HBO's Boardwalk Empire

Steve Buscemi in Boardwalk Empire.

Now 8 episodes into its 12-episode run, HBO's Boardwalk Empire (created by Terence Wintner, a writer on The Sopranos), is an unfocused mess. Telling the story of Enoch 'Nucky' Thompson, king of Atlantic City in the 1920s, Boardwalk Empire tries to embrace both the mantles of The Sopranos coupled with the period cool surrounding another Soprano alum's show, Matthew Weiner's Mad Men. But it just doesn't work for an untold number of reasons. Thompson was a real person who was simultaneously a crook and a politician (better crook than politician). Well, he's almost real. Based on Eunuch 'Nucky' Johnson, Thompson is not the problem with the show. As played by perennial supporting player, Steve Buscemi, 'Nucky' is actually a compelling character to have at a show's centre, and Buscemi is quite wonderful in the role. Buscemi has made a career out of playing second-banana weasels in innumerable movies, but this is his first legit lead and he makes the absolute most of it. You can actually believe that, because of his power, a man as unattractive as 'Nucky' can and does have innumerable women throwing themselves at him.

An Intricate, Beautiful Thing: Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water

Sally Hawkins and Doug Jones in The Shape of Water.

Last month, when I attended Guillermo del Toro’s exhibition At Home With Monsters at the Art Gallery of Ontario, one of the things that impressed itself most strongly upon me was the filmmaker’s fascination with otherness. The weird, the unsettling, and the macabre have always had a presence in his work, but his more sensitive artistic tendencies are expressed through his fondness for the freaks and outcasts of the world – those deemed to be somehow “other” than the rest of us. It might not be readily apparent in a filmography full of graphic violence and disturbing imagery, but a deep vein of compassion runs through del Toro’s oeuvre, especially for those who seldom receive it from society. The Shape of Water is by far his most compassionate film, celebrating otherness so directly and so proudly that it seems wondrous he managed to get the thing in front of general audiences at all.

Character Study: Don Cheadle's Miles Ahead

Don Cheadle as Miles Davis in Miles Ahead.

In 1989, Miles Davis published his autobiography with co-writer Quincy Troupe. It’s an invigorating read as Davis talks about his life in music and why he chose a career in jazz, “The greatest feeling I ever had in my life, with my clothes on, was when I first heard Diz and Bird together in St. Louis, MI, back in 1944.” Davis was referring to Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker the seminal progenitors of be-bop, a highly inventive and stylized extension of jazz music.

While he cites that moment as a turning point in his artistic career, Davis also opens up about a dark period in his life from 1975 to 1980. This chapter is particularly important because Miles completely lost that precious moment he experienced in 1944 and turned to alcohol, sex and drugs. He put down his horn, closed himself off from the world and bottomed out: “I became a hermit, hardly ever going outside. My only connection with the outside world was mostly through watching television, which was on around the clock … the house was filthy and real dark and gloomy.” He goes on to say “sex and drugs took the place that music had occupied in my life until then and I did both of them around the clock.” Davis’ drug of choice at the time was high quality cocaine. He writes, “after a while, all of this got routine and boring, but only after I had had my fill of it.” Which leads us to the center of Don Cheadle's first directorial effort, Miles Ahead.

War Stories: 1945 and Last Flag Flying

A scene from Ferenc Török's 1945.

1945, by the Hungarian director Ferenc Török, written by Török and Gábor T. Szántó, is a startling piece of work – acerbic and mournful, satirical and humane. It’s set in a tiny Hungarian town just after the end of World War II, when the residents are beginning to get used to the presence of the Russians, some of whom are full of their own new-found power. (One young soldier demands that a civilian alighting from the midday train trade his more elegant hat for the soldier’s rumpled one.) The movie isn’t about the new Soviet presence, however; that’s merely one of the elements Török mixes to create a complex historical portrait. It’s a symbolic ghost story in which the dark secrets of the townspeople – their collusion, for base personal reasons, in the removal of the local Jews to the death camps – come to light when two strangers, Orthodox Jewish Holocaust survivors, enter the town on that same train on mysterious business (burying the dead, as it turns out), unsettling the guilty residents.

Call Me by Your Name: Veneer of Romance

Timothée Chalamet and Armie Hammer in Call Me by Your Name.

In Luca Guadagnino’s Call Me by Your Name, an American grad student in his mid-twenties named Oliver (Armie Hammer) spends six weeks in northern Italy during the summer months in residence as a research assistant to an archeologist (Michael Stuhlbarg) and has a love affair with Elio Perlman (Timothée Chalamet), his host’s seventeen-year-old son. Neither of the young men identifies himself as gay – the first object of Oliver’s amorous attentions is Chiara (Victoire Du Bois), a neighbor of the Perlmans, and before Elio cements his relationship with Oliver he loses his virginity to Chiara’s daughter Marzia (Esther Garrel). Guadagnino and the screenwriter, James Ivory (adapting a novel by André Aciman), present their romance as a perfect confluence of physical and emotional energies at an ideal time in both their lives – especially Elio’s, since it’s his coming-of-age story – and in an ideal setting, a beautiful old villa in a picturesque town set against the magnificent landscape of Lombardy. (Sayombhu Mukdeeprom photographed.) Elio is a great-looking kid with an air of social and intellectual privilege; he’s fluent in English, French and Italian – his mother (Amira Casar) is Italian – his family has lived all over, he’s an accomplished pianist, and he has a comfortable, bantering relationship with the teenagers of the other summer people in the town. He walks around shirtless in shorts or swim trunks, smoking; he might be the image of the adolescent on holiday, snug in his own skin. But he holds back. He spends more time alone, reading or transcribing music, than he does with the other kids, and when they go to a club he’s the last on the dance floor. We see him eyeballing Oliver, who’s physically expressive – in sports, at a dance, or just lying on the edge of the pool reading – and it’s clear that he both envies the older man and is somewhat resentful of how easily he fits in. Their bedrooms are next door to each other – he has to give up his own room to this American visitor – and the day Oliver shows up, he’s so jet-lagged that he plops himself down on his bed, falls asleep instantly and opts to skip dinner, and Elio is put off by his refusal to act the role of the guest who does what’s expected of him. He thinks that Oliver’s impulsiveness and his manner are arrogant – and the fact that both his parents take to Oliver immediately and aren’t remotely bothered by his style doesn’t help. But Oliver reaches out to him in a friendly way, and Elio loses his skepticism – which is, of course, just a resistance to his own attraction to Oliver.

A Curdled Comedy of Manners: Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine

Cate Blanchett in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine

Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen’s 45th movie as director, is also surprisingly one of his most memorable, largely but not only because of Cate Blanchett’s powerful lead performance as a mentally ill socialite fallen upon hard times. Allen’s track record for most of the last 20 years has been pretty mediocre, with the majority of his movies scanning at best as irrelevant. Even the few good films, Manhattan Murder Mystery (1993), Bullets Over Broadway (1994) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (2008), seemed less fresh or creative than earlier Allen movies like Zelig (1983), Broadway Danny Rose (1985), and Radio Days (1987), not to mention classics like Annie Hall (1977) and Manhattan (1979). So who would have expected Blue Jasmine to be as unique, disturbing and honest as it is?

Tensions between History and Film: Trumbo

Bryan Cranston as Dalton Trumbo in Trumbo.

Before a scene is shot, a screenplay is necessary. The screenwriter may draw upon his own imagination as well as other source material, as does John McNamara in Trumbo. But therein also lies a major problem: McNamara conveys skewed or caricatured portraits of gossip columnist, Hedda Hopper, actors John Wayne and Edgar G. Robinson, but also relies substantially on Bruce Cook’s hagiographic 1977 biography Trumbo (reissued in 2015), a source that the screenwriter acknowledges having read ten times. Cook did extensive interviews, including with Dalton Trumbo himself, to write primarily about his personal life and professional career as Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter before the blacklist. During those repressive times, he peddled scripts to small independent companies and then used a “front” who pretended to be the writer. Two of his scripts, for which he could not be credited, won Oscars.

Unfortunately, Dalton Trumbo’s politics is given short shrift in Cook’s biography, a major flaw that is reflected in the film, given that Trumbo’s politics is the driving force behind making the film. As a result, Jay Roach has directed a simplistic, superficial and curiously apolitical biopic – notwithstanding a few heated exchanges about labour strikes in the film industry and Trumbo handing out leaflets – that drains the historical setting from 1946 until the early 1960s of any real context. I say curious because his earlier effort, Game Change, a television movie about John McCain’s disastrous decision to choose Sarah Palin as his 2008 running mate, is an insightful political film and vastly superior to this mediocre and occasionally embarrassing, puerile production. The blacklist that deprived hundreds of Hollywood personalities of their jobs polarized Americans. Roach’s Trumbo has replicated that polarization – some critics calling it a “thoughtful account” and a “sobering true event” while others have dismissed it as a “whitewash.” Unfortunately, I must side with the latter assessment, but for different reasons.